Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/40

34 party, under Southern leaders, that made the war of 1810; which was resisted by the best spirits of the North. It was the South that dragged the Union into the attack upon Mexico. Every aggression—every scheme of aggression—was Southern. From Southern politicians installed at Washington proceeded all the insolent menaces and all the maxims of violence which have been so carelessly visited on the heads of their opponents and successors.

Grow the American Federation must. Its people know that it must grow: and diplomacy will do well at once to acquiesce in the natural and inevitable course of things. But the growth will be that of peaceful expansion and attraction; not of forcible annexation, of which I believe no considerable party at the North dreams or has ever dreamed. The British North American colonies will in time, and probably at no very distant time, unite themselves politically to the group of states, of which they are already by race, position, commercial ties, and the characteristics of their institutions a part. No one can stand by the side of the St. Lawrence and doubt that in the end they will do this; but they will be left to do it of their own free will.

Even as regards the Indians, it will be found, I believe, that it is on the South, not on the North, that the blame of the most flagrant aggressions rests. By the New Englanders greater and more sincere efforts were made on the whole to reclaim and Christianise these tribes than have been made by colonists in the case of any other savage race. But here disturbing influences from an extraneous source came in. Towards the close of the seventeenth century England and France went to war, armed the savage tribes on both sides in their American dependencies, and